Overdrive Radio

That's the message in a certain way of the very existence of companies like Forum Mobility, around for just a couple years as a vehicle-charging-services and equipment leasing company. Company regional director Ron Hunt leads the podcast with that very notion, sounding like many an owner-operator in wait-and-see mode around electric-drive tech and battery-charging-infrastructure development. Hunt’s a veteran of the trucking world who got involved with electric-truck start-up Xos Trucks some time back. Yet what he learned led him to the charging-infrastructure side, in part given absolutely huge barriers that exist to any widespread adoption of electric Class 8s.

On October 25 we published the anchor story in a series around electric-drive-power realities, in which Alex Lockie unveiled and contextualized Overdrive readers’ views on the current state of electrification as it relates the specific needs of their mostly OTR businesses: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15544337/teslas-semi-may-blow-past-diesels-uphill-but-truckers-see-limits

Putting it quite succinctly, here’s how one owner-operator commenter in some ways summed up current views on the nature of quite literally all battery-electric Class 8 technology as it relates to bedrock operational feasibility OTR: "It's not going to work, the power grid can't handle it, and the trucks don't go far enough on a charge."

Hunt and his colleagues at the Forum Mobility company aim to help on the grid front, and well realize any “electric revolution” will be a good long time in coming to trucking, even port drayage where they're specializing.

It is certainly growing fast if electric Class 8 tractors running in California still only number in the low three digits, Ron Hunt emphasized. Port drayage in the state is where those units are most prominent, for good reason. The California Air Resources Board has done everything it can to really make the market there, with an end-of-year deadline for dray haulers to register their diesels within CARB’s system. And as of the first of the year, if lawsuits don’t derail this particular deadline (a little more on that in the podcast, and here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15636769/california-trucking-association-seeks-injunction-of-diesel-truck-ban ), any truck registered to work California ports must be a “zero emissions vehicle” – we’ll use that ZEV shorthand a bit, though no manufactured product in today’s world is truly “zero emissions."

Forum Mobility is aiming nonetheless to be a power provider with subscription-based charging access to sites in both Southern and Northern California specifically built with drayage trucks in mind. They’re also combining electric truck-lease services with those charging-power subscriptions for those who want to pursue that kind of model, as they build a planned six facilities over the next couple years. Today on the podcast, excerpts from a talk with Ron Hunt and two other Forum reps about how the business got its start and just where it’s planning to go to serve drayage haulers in California, and beyond.

Another related element of the series is this feature about Hight Logistics, Forum Mobility's partner small fleet now running five electric trucks in SoCal ports leased through Forum: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15546421/small-fleet-owner-predicts-longterm-roi-with-batteryelectric

Nashville, Tennessee-based Ken Greff in this edition of Overdrive Radio tells the tale of the early years of his 70-year trucking career in and around trucking, much of it spent in truck sales in Tennessee. Yet Greff got his start behind the wheel far away from the U.S. Southeast in Western Canada, driving and owning trucks in a variety of operations.

The podcast excerpts the first edition of a new effort by host and McMahon Truck Centers sales rep Corey Price, who lives due East of Nashville near Cookeville, Tennessee.

Price interviewed Greff for the first episode of what he’s calling, simply, “Trucking Legends,” an old-school-trucking podcast he envisions as a repository for preserving the stories of those who’ve been in the business going way back. Spotify link to the show is here, but you can find it via most podcast platforms: https://open.spotify.com/show/03I3nAD4uLhcCPAMSpdqmZ

Corey Price has known Greff since his days as lead man in the Music City chapter of the American Truck Historical Society, and Greff served as a sales mentor to him when he took his first truck-sales job at an International dealer in Cookeville. Along the way, Price, a truck and trucking history enthusiast since he was a kid, got to know Greff’s past a good bit better -- it stretches all the way back to World War II times when, shortly thereafter, as a teenager, he got his start trucking via a little bit of a subterfuge on the part of his mother, as you’ll hear in the episode. (It included his first part-owned truck, the early-1950s White Western Star pictured in the thumbnail image for this episode.) As noted, Greff's story is excerpted from the first edition of what Corey Price hopes will eventually be a monthly podcast.

Along the way, as we run through Ken Greff’s early days trucking toward how he got from driving and owning rigs in Western Canada to sales in Middle Tennessee, we’ll hear more from Price, too, on his motivation for creating the podcast.

If you've got a tip on a veritable trucking legend you feel like Price ought to feature, he asks that you let him know via his email: [email protected]

Misplaced priorities, too, according to K&D Transport's Andrew Axelson in this edition of Overdrive Radio: "Instead of limiting the speed on trucks, they should really limit the speed on cars," he said. That where he contends most of the outlandish speed issues on American highways today sits.

This round of viewpoints on the FMCSA's move toward a speed limiter device mandate for in-use trucks follows September news picked up via the Department of Transportation’s regulatory calendar update that month that seemed to suggest FMCSA had settled on a 68-mph speed setting for its planned proposal of a mandate. When he got that news, Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills was immediately reminded of the time in 2012 when the federal agency appeared to be proposing to adopt fairly stringent sleep apnea screening restrictions as official regulatory guidance, only to almost immediately retract that, citing a “clerical error” after the restrictions were published in the Federal Register for comment: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14877502/sleep-apnea-reg-recommendations-comments-closed

Among other things, those apnea-screening restrictions would have required any trucker with a body-mass-index measure of just 35 to undergo apnea testing as a condition of getting a medical card. The notion that this could be bona fide guidance set off shockwaves around trucking. Congress soon after forbade the agency to change official sleep apnea guidance or regulation through any process other than formal rulemaking.

When it comes to a speed-limiter mandate today, somewhat similar dynamics are play. As with changes to the sleep apnea approach back then, it’s clear FMCSA wants to move on a mandate for speed-limiter use, yet what speed setting is to be adopted remains the big question.

FMCSA quickly retracted the language suggesting the 68 mph setting reported, among other details, from the DOT regs calendar: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15635000/68-mph-dot-report-sheds-light-fmcsas-speed-limiter-intent

But also as with the apnea “leak” in 2012, the shockwaves have continued to ripple out.

In this podcast, we drop into the scene around the Mayberry Truck Show in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, at the end of last month just after the latest speed-limiter news emerged. Overdrive video editor Lawson Rudisill found that the 68-mph news traveled fast, and gathered a bevy of views from owner-operators and other truckers in attendance at the truck show.

Dive in here for a round of views from six owners and operators.

More from Rudisill's video work at the Mayberry Truck Show:

**Benefit truck convoy: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/video/15635690/watch-the-rigs-roll-through-at-mayberry-truck-show

**Full show walkthrough: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/video/15635538/a-long-walk-through-the-2023-mayberry-truck-show

In this edition of Overdrive Radio, the clarion voices of the spectacular pair of owner-operators behind Chicago-area-based, two-truck Rita’s Absolute Trucking. That’d be Roger and Rita Wilson, who made a match with marriage in 1998 after separate histories trucking, Rita toting butter up and down the Eastern seaboard, Roger with an OTR history that stretches back to hauling swinging meat in 1970 his first time out over-the-road.

Through the 1980s, he worked with a friend in LTL consolidation out of the Chicago area, growing to 50 trucks there before venturing out on his own with five. Then Rita brought two of her own to the operation, becoming Rita's Absolute early this century and growing to 15 units. They’ve had big ups and downs managing fleets both, but after a slow period of downsizing over more than decade are now settled squarely into a super-sweet niche moving reefer trailers full of finished chocolate mostly between Chicago and Pennsylvania, for a single customer.

The pair were our Truckers of the Month for September, and regular Overdrive readers may recall their story recently published at OverdriveOnline.com: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15635072/lifes-a-lot-easier-ownerops-find-sweet-spot-with-two-trucks

In that story, we heard from a Ryder System rep directly about the Wilsons’ work with their warehousing customer in Blommer Chocolate Company, who've been the Wilson's customer for two decades now. Ryder had nothing but praise for Rita’s Absolute Trucking, for sure. Yet after the story published, we also heard back finally from a rep from Blommer. Janie Moore called Rita and Roger Wilson’s Absolute Trucking the “Absolute best. If I could have more carriers like them it would be a joy!”

Moore has worked with the pair for eight years, she said, and they’ve “helped simplify managing" and now totally dominate "the Illinois to Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania to Illinois lanes. Locally,” too, Rita has been a godsend, she added. “There were times we had more loads to move than they could manage legally in a day. Rita would go out of her way and rent a trailer for preloading purposes. This was not a Blommer request, but instead a decision she made to assist. And for that we are forever grateful.”

In eight years, Moore said, “I can count on one hand the times where they were late or delayed. While we know things happen beyond the carrier’s control, they have been more than proactive and giving us advance notification on mishaps, transportation delays, breakdowns, and etc.”

A worthy pair to honor, no doubt. And, clearly, they’ve found a sweet spot hauling chocolate.

Owner-operator business services firm ATBS' midyear owner-operator update session September 19 revealed a few different ways the average ATBS client might make up the income loss we’ve seen over the last year and a half -- on average, it’s been an almost 10% decline.

In real terms, though, as ATBS VP Mike Hosted notes at the top of this edition, a 1% increase in fuel mileage would get all of that back for the average owner-operator. In short, there are tangible things that can be done to combat what's been tough times of late, particularly in the spot markets for freight.

For this edition, know that there’s also a Youtube version that is airing the same day that includes Mike Hosted’s presentation in full, if you want to follow along with all his slides presenting market and operating analysis data: https://youtu.be/toHRRbwi1Pc

Podcast listeners can download the slides, too. Follow along via the link you'll find here: http://overdriveonline.com/15634919

The audio comes from ATBS’ annual midyear temperature taking of the trucking market for owner-operators, offering a variety of insights. Things have changed mightily since this time a year ago. Rates are down big-time in the spot market, a little less so but also down in the contract market. That’s come with some positives. With declining demand, used-truck prices are way down, too, and parts and other maintenance difficulties, though not entirely resolved, seem to be getting better.

Hosted here runs through a bevy of the data for a market update, but also dives into real numbers averaged among clients who are independents with authority and/or small fleet operators and leased flatbed, reefer and dry van owners, to present bellwether industry averages against which to benchmark your own business performance.

A couple things definitely have not changed for the better since last year. Fuel’s recent moves have taken it back to the highest of highs, ever more reason to focus on fuel mileage improvement. And in addition to the long rates tumble, there’s another market-impacting element that’s decidedly worse coming out of the freight highs of the post-COVID period -- the cost of borrowing.

Yet there are a variety of indicators that have the folks at ATBS, Hosted included, feeling like we’ve hit the bottom of this market – quite some time ago, in fact. And though we’re probably going to stay here a while when it comes to rates, for owners who can weather the storm, the bottom line could look considerably better this time next year.

Owners looking for additional business-planning and other management tips, among a myriad of other topics, can find more in the Overdrive/ATBS-coproduced "Partners in Business" manual for new and established owner-operators, a comprehensive guide to running a small trucking business: http://overdriveonline.com/pib

Also in the podcast: Matt Cole live from the Guilty by Association Truck Show in Joplin Missouri in the area around 4 State Trucks there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/article/15634903/guilty-by-association-truck-show-starts-strong-in-joplin

Cole reports from Day 1 at GBATS -- How many owner-operators were at the show? What’s the mood in what’s certainly been a challenging year for so many small-business truckers? Cole spoke as owner-operators were getting parked up at 4 State Trucks and the surrounding area in Joplin, Missouri, for a bit of an update on how things were looking on-site at one of the absolutely biggest gatherings of the trucking community the nation over.

Cole also directed traffic with Game Creek Video entertainment-biz hauler Tommy Marshall out along University Avenue at the Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa. Marshall is lead driver every fall for a crew of seven rigs and operators that make up quite a unique trucking niche. If you’ve been to OverdriveOnline.com this past week you’ll likely know that Marshall is the lead man for the mobile-television production of ESPN’s College Gameday broadcast, which airs every Saturday throughout the Fall ahead of the day’s football games, live from a different university site each week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15634571/a-unique-beast-behind-the-scenes-on-mobile-tv-production-trucking

Drop into some of Cole’s detailed reporting around the operation, with Marshall in the production studio truck for Game Creek Video and several operators from a few different companies dedicated to the production. That includes West River Light and Sound, and longtime trucker Gerry Glass. It’s Glass’s initial contact that led to the opportunity Cole got to spend with Tommy Marshall and the rest of the crew in Tuscaloosa two weeks back. Glass got in touch with Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills on Labor Day Monday, as the crew was prepping to head to Tuscaloosa to stage on the campus for Alabama v. Texas.

Would we be interested in seeing what they do firsthand? Gerry Glass asked. Overdrive is headquartered in Tuscaloosa, of course, but Dills live in Nashville, Tennessee. However; Cole was the perfect man for the job, a U. of A. Crimson Tide fan, no less.

He was on-hand for their initial unloading two days later, on Wednesday, and parts of the set-up the following days, too, with Tommy Marshall as a guide. Marshall and crew do a great deal more than just drive in such a production, of course -- in fact, driving might be the least time-consuming part of the whole affair, depending on whatever university location Gameday chooses week to week.

Cole ultimately delivered with a detailed look at the mobile-TV trucking niche. Find that and other reports from a wide array of freight niche operations via our occasional Niche Hauls series, collected via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4378936

K&D Transport third-generation owner/manager Adam Johnson in this Overdrive Radio edition narrates the beginnings of his grandfather’s time trucking with a 1946 Brockway he purchased without the seats to save a little on the price. – It was a different time, and Johnson’s grandfather was back from World War II, where he was a POW for 18 months, Johnson said, a story he told in part attendant to our recent profile of K&D Transport recognition their semi-finalist status in Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship this year: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15544771/kd-transport-owner-in-the-groove-with-thirdgen-flatbed-fleet

In the podcast, we pick up around the edges of the parts of Adam Johnson and the K&D Transport fleet’s story that we didn’t much cover in that business feature. The 14-truck fleet has quite a story, particularly with regard to recent-history moves that have cemented its current mix of flatbed freight. Yet there’s more to Johnson particularly than just straight-up business. Or rather there are other aspects to the breadth and depth of his businesses that are well worthy of attention beyond the story we told at Overdrive.

Johnson’s increasingly established himself in the custom-truck world with Johnson Hill Customs, also offering general maintenance and repair services to local operators, in addition to maintaining the K&D fleet and everything else that comes with managing a trucking business.

In this portion of our recent conversation, too, you’ll hear a man with a sharp eye for details to help build pride and dedication among the team, saving and making money all the while.

Along the way, details about his seven-year-old son's rig, a 1978 Kenworth W900A body Johnson used to build what amounts to a Frankensteined pickup on a 1990s Dodge chassis. His and other custom KW owners' sons had a quite a blast with it before, during and after Kenworth's big 100th-anniversary truck parade earlier this year, in which it and other among K&D trucks ran.

Owner-operator Steven Massat is today headquartered in Addison, Illinois, and leased to nearby small fleet T Max Transportation with quite a special truck. Regular Overdrive readers may well have seen his story at OverdriveOnline.com a couple weeks back now: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15546000/ownerop-overcomes-physical-challenge-for-successful-career

There, owner-operator Massat was named August Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running for Overdrive's 2023 Trucker of the Year award: http://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year

We’ve been counting down the months this year with profiles of and podcasts with each of the individual monthly semi-finalist owners -- or teams of owners, as it were. In this week's edition, Massat describes the teamwork he and his wife make of the business -- she handles much of the back office work while he runs the roads and, on the weekend, utilizes a purpose-built shop to maintain the late 1980s-built B-model Cat engine in that special rig, a beautiful 1989 Marmon.

Back-office and other family support proves critical for the owner. When he was just 18 years old he was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis -- his life since that has been one of managing pain and complications day after day. He’s 53 now, though, and after decades of dump work with various Chicago construction outfits as an owner-operator, what used to be his winter time home at T Max is now a year-round affair.

Outbound from the region, he serves T Max direct customers, often running spot market loads back, however slim pickings have been for those returns of late. His success sits on a foundation of conversative maintenance intervals, a laser focus on efficiency, and other smart business basics.

For this edition of Overdrive Radio, DAT Freight and Analytics' Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Hopper, who’s been with the company now for decades, notes the undeniable spike in double brokering, in identity theft and hop-in, hop-out "take the money and run" and other schemes that has led to a doubling of staff in DAT’s compliance department as well as a host of other in-process security enhancements there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15542218/dat-steps-up-fight-against-freight-fraud-but-is-it-enough

DAT's not alone, of course -- competitors at Truckstop.com have been doing similar things when it comes ID’ing the various types of “bad behavior” and working with the good guys out there to put a stop to it where possible, in no small part thanks to the efforts of a myriad of small business truckers to raise the temperature around the issue of double brokering and other fraud: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15541639/the-third-parties-following-truckers-around-freight-networks

Among those is Matthew Patrick, with GMH Transportation. Regular readers may recall his two-part "The double-brokering slow burn" at OverdriveOnline.com a couple weeks back: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15543642/double-brokering-scourge-how-it-works-how-to-fight-back

The stories outlined a year and more’s worth of efforts undertaken to identify some of the bad actors and take action to get them removed from the platforms where they ply their “trade.’ DAT’s Jeff Hopper in today’s episode of Overdrive Radio called it all organized cyber crime, really.

Before our talk with Hopper featured in this episode, we share a particular case that Patrick sent along earlier this week at about the same time we were getting ready to talk to Hopper. The case involved two different examples in which two different brokers’ loads were double-brokered by a single entity, the “Cheetah Import and Export” broker, MC# 1477261.

What stood out to Patrick was that in each double-brokered load case, Cheetah offered considerably more to move the load than what the original brokers offered a carrier, suggestive of a company in what Patrick calls the “take the money run” phase of a double broker’s evolution. You know the story if you’ve read Overdrive over years now -- run up as much in revenue as you can, stiff all the carriers, and disappear into the ether when the bond is cashed and canceled: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/14897461/broker-scams-owneroperators-and-fleets-need-to-be-aware-of

Over the course of the last few days, it looks like that particular broker’s bond company has notified the feds of impending cancelation -- a bond that was effective starting in early August this year is now set to cancel September 29, flagged in FMCSA’s Licensing and Insurance public portal as such.

We called the bond company the morning of Friday, September 1, and they noted five claims for nonpayment already, the largest of the claims for $5,000. Attempts to contact the broker by phone for comment yielded only a day’s-long busy signal. Email then sent to the entity's primary contact laid out all of these details and asked if the company planned to respond to claims on the bond. That gleaned only a short response in an unsigned return email from a rep with the display name "Gevork Sulian":

“What are you talking about? What happened? We are 1 year in this industry and never had a problem with our carriers.”

As far as Matt Patrick knows, despite having filed complaints against this particular company, they were still able to post loads on DAT as of Friday. DAT reps assured that that they are investigating the complaints, but be forewarned if this company comes calling, or you run across any company’s overly high rates on the boards. Scams abound, as Jeff Hopper further emphasizes in today’s edition of Overdrive Radio.

Chris Dowdy counts he and his wife, Paula, and their family among the lucky ones. The subject of this edition of Overdrive Radio is one ripped right from the last month or so of a myriad headlines -- the bankruptcy and ceasing operations of Yellow, The LTL giant finally shut after being propped up by an astounding amount of loaned money straight from the U.S. taxpayer in recent years. That followed the business generally struggling financially for many more.

The largely union workforce there was a home for many, many people, though, and that included Dowdy for a substantial part of the last decade or so. If his name sounds familiar, longtime Overdrive readers among you may well recall his time driving for Wooten Transports with a home base in Memphis, when he spearheaded an initiative he called Truckers for Hope years ago: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14885626/new-truckers-for-hope-initiative-to-benefit-st-jude

Through the philanthropic effort, Dowdy staged visits to St. Jude’s and Ronald MacDonad House in Memphis with other drivers to deliver a message of trucking goodwill for children and their families there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14887082/truckers-for-hopes-round-two-at-st-jude-close-brush-with-60-below

The Truckers for Hope effort’s still in the back of his mind for a restart post-COVID, but he’s had bigger fish to fry this past month with the loss of work since Yellow shut down.

As noted, though, he’s one of the lucky ones, soon to start a regional gig doing what he’s done for most of the past quarter-century -- "harassing traffic," as he puts it, joking. Yeah, that means "driving." Others laid off with Yellow shutting down haven’t been so lucky, and as with any such company implosion, though business press charts the financial missteps: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15543136/a-yellow-bankruptcy-would-influence-freight-used-trucks

**The ensuing lawsuits: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15543677/former-yellow-employee-files-suit-over-layoff-notice-i96-i75-closures

**The reorganizations with creditors and the like: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15542702/yellow-looming-teamster-strike-breaches-labor-agreement

... what’s often lost in coverage is the toll it all takes on the individual people who are cast off to scramble for their future.

Hear Dowdy's story and worry particularly for non-CDL former Yellow employees here.